


restless dreams

by Starfire (kalypsobean)



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Community: be_compromised, F/M, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-28
Updated: 2015-12-28
Packaged: 2018-05-10 00:52:12
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5562451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kalypsobean/pseuds/Starfire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>This is a gift for spyforaday at the <a href="http://be-compromised.livejournal.com">be_compromised</a> Secret Santa 2015, based on the prompt <i>But if my silence made you leave, then that would be my worst mistake.</i></p>
    </blockquote>





	restless dreams

**Author's Note:**

> This is a gift for spyforaday at the [be_compromised](http://be-compromised.livejournal.com) Secret Santa 2015, based on the prompt _But if my silence made you leave, then that would be my worst mistake._

  
banner by inkvoices @ livejournal

The file they gave him is thin; they slid it under his door, so it's not something he regards as surprising, at least not at first. Parts of it are in Russian - photocopies of pictures of documents, perhaps, because they're grainy and blurry in all the wrong places. It would bug him if he read Russian, but he can only speak about ten words and understands about twenty more, most of them regionally specific curses and even then, only that they mean he should be wary of the speaker throwing things.

She doesn't look like the kind to be throwing breakables, though; her picture is clear enough, it has to be, so he gets the right target, but he sees her as more of the knife-in-the-boot type, the kind that lets you in close and then stabs you while you're looking into her eyes, willing yourself to just get through this without your body betraying you while it's bleeding out.

 

He knows what he's supposed to do by now; they obviously trust him enough to understand without risking his cover by calling him in, not that he's got a great cover, but still. If she was alert to SHIELD, and she could tie him to them if he was caught, it probably wouldn't go so well. 

It's easier to be deniable if they can actually deny you; this is a thing he knows as well, but he tries not to give it much thought. The shadows are where he thrives best, after all, and he has to wear glasses to block out the sun; it messes with the ability to aim, even if it didn't give him such a headache. Luckily, the only sightings of the target have been at night, and even then, they're only possibles - enough for SHIELD to be worried, enough for Fury to send him, but not enough for a team. Track and report, assess, analyse; he's to kill only if it's her or him. Takes the fun out of it a bit, some would say, but he grew up shooting at painted walls and weighted balloons; he doesn't have quite the taste for blood he's heard the others do. If she was a threat, they'd be sending someone else.

He leaves his bow at home, that first night.

 

He finds the place she was first seen, easily enough; it's an alley, lined with stairs that wobble as he climbs them, looking for the highest landing. There's just a bit of snow underfoot, not so much that it doesn't melt to sludge as soon as he puts his foot down, but enough that he holds onto the railing in case he falls. He trusts himself, not the stairs, and he can't afford to slip the wrong way if she's here. Of all the locations, this is the one most likely to be where she lives, if any; he can't afford to be vulnerable while he's not sure. She could be the shadow that flits through a window two stories below as the sun rises, turning the aerials and clotheslines to black against a pink-red-grey sky, or she could be the one with her head down and jacket held tightly against the sleet, hair hidden beneath a beanie.

It only takes the one night for him to decide it's a bust - too many windows to check and too many of them with signs that say _for rent_ , too many alcoves with blankets just visible under boxes, too many people slipping in and out of doorways and shadows. He could spend weeks here, watching them all, and he would still not find the one who was trained to blend in the most.

 

He doesn't do clubs, generally; they're loud, and he finds the quivering of the floor disturbing. He can mingle, if he's dressed the part, but he feels the air sticking to him like a second skin, one that he can never wait to peel off, and the smell of beer begins to grate as it permeates, as more people drink and dance and it becomes impossible to distinguish from the smell of cigarettes and perfume. He can't fathom why she'd come here; he sees her more as the classical type, sitting daintily in a box above the rows and rows of people watching a single person on a stage. Her eyes would follow the cellist's fingers, the dancer's line, and she would smile if something was especially perfect.

But she's here, amid the electropop he can't quite pin down, and she smiles at him, and then she is gone. The crowd is too dense for him to reach her, and he doesn't try, sure that if he reached the exit only a second after her, she would have disappeared, perhaps into the haze that settles in the air above his head.

He goes home early, aware that the streets are empty; it's in between late and morning, and he dreams of her, when he is not awake, wondering why he is not dead.

 

He doesn't go to the third place; he knows she won't be there. She knows he is looking for her now, even if she doesn't know why; he had looked at her long enough, been still enough, that she would have understood, even if he hadn't felt his breath slide out from his lungs and hang in the air at the sight of her, leaving him still, light enough that he could perhaps have floated if the crowd hadn't held him down. She had looked at him, and he felt almost as if she had looked into him, somehow; he felt raw now, though he tells himself he's making stuff up because he didn't sleep right. It was as if she had seen something inside of him, the same thing he had felt that kept him still just enough to give her time to slip away, or perhaps had even read his mind. _You're the same as me,_ he'd thought, on seeing her carefully expressionless eyes and the way her hair was styled just enough to disguise its colour under the neon lighting. 

 

His assessment is done, he still has to track her; one confirmed location won't satisfy Fury, even in this strange world where she could be back in Russia already, or Baghdad, or anywhere else within a hundred miles of a safe landing place. She could have been here for one thing and, if she was done, have left, never to return. 

He could never see her again; yet, he can almost sense her, as if she's left a mark on the city and created within it a space for herself, perhaps even a city within it, one of high places with good sightlines, dark shadows leading to small spaces, time that stretches out into moments that last and springs back to amplify the chaos that follows in seconds of movement and fear. It's the same kind of place he's carved out for himself; a city filled with rooftops and wide, clear expanses where the air twists with each breath of the wind. 

He doesn't need to look for her. They live in the same world.

 

He doesn't need to look for her because he wakes up, still wearing the leather jacket stained with so many smells he can only just sense the popcorn and candy floss, and she is perched on the end of his bed.  
"Why didn't you come after me?" she says. He blinks as he pushes himself up, and she repeats herself once he can see her face. "I thought SHIELD would send someone better than that."

"I'm not SHIELD," he says. "I work with them sometimes, but, I'm not one of their lackeys."

"Not one for authority," she says, nodding slightly; it's more of a tilt to the left and a narrowing of the eyes, as if she's looking at him again, as if this new information changes how he looks, with his hair askew and his eyes probably not quite ready to open all the way.

"You'll do," she says, and then time crashes back in on itself, running twice as fast as it had when she was looking at him and he was staring back, seeing only what she wanted him to see, and yet, by knowing that, seeing past her and into her soul. "I want you to bring me in."

"Okay," he says, and he rubs his hand over his face as if the temporary blindness will convince him this is a dream. "But you know what this means, right? What they'll probably do?"

"Drag me into a room with no windows and question me until they realise I mean it and I'm not giving them anything they don't already have, and then Nick Fury will decide I'm better on a leash than off it, and let me back out. Probably what they did to you, right?" She says it without her face changing, not even once, as if she's resigned to it, or it was something she planned all along. He can't really tell, for once, and he's gotten good at reading people.

"Fine, fine," he says. "Your funeral. I gotta change first."

"Please do," she says. "You stink."

"And I suppose you showered," he says, and then he realises she probably did; she's wearing clothes that look business casual but he knows would be easy to move in, and he can't smell her the way he can himself. "You planned this, of course you did," he mutters. She hands him a change of clothes, neatly folded, from the end of his bed.

"Ten minutes. Can't have my partner looking like he was out all night."

"Partner, right," he says. He's never been so grateful to put a door between him and a woman, and yet, he can see it; he hasn't felt unsafe so far, and there were all the things she didn't need to say that he understood, that he didn't need to find a way to express. They just were, as if they fit all along; like he didn't know she was missing and now it's like she was always there, in the space that wasn't.


End file.
